Charly Musonda has signed a new contract with Chelsea, so what were the heavy links with Arsenal all about?

Despite consistently complaining about his lack of game time with Chelsea and reportedly pushing for a January move, Musonda has signed a new deal with the Blues until 2022.

https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/939203150229143553

Therefore, it does seem as if Arsenal have once again been used to get another player a better contract at their existing club.

Although this isn’t nearly on the same scale, Mauro Icardi did the same with Inter in 2016. The forward’s agent, who also happens to be his wife Wanda Nara, consistently hinted that he was off throughout the summer transfer window before the Serie A club handed him a bumper deal in October.

By making Icardi look like hot property and as if he could do a runner any minute, Nara forced Inter to offer him a better contract because they wanted him to stay.

It appears that this is what Musonda’s agent has done with him but we obviously can’t be sure.

The Belgium international has only made two Premier League appearances for Chelsea this term and two in the League Cup. This led the 21-year-old to publicly complain, again, about his lack of minutes.

Arsenal were said to be interested in the winger at one stage, probably because we signed Eddie Nketiah from Chelsea after they released him this year.

However, we then reportedly dropped our interest in favour of focusing all our energy on Reiss Nelson, which makes sense.

At least this story is dead heading into January but whether Arsenal were ever really interested or not we might never know.